It is that damned s'perior. Despite jmFoo's objection, I shall retell the story for the world. Once upon a time, I worked a shift for a coworker. Well, my boss has this illegally immoral position on trading shifts where if employee A trades with employee B, employee A gets paid for when employee B works and vice versa. She does this to avoid paying overtime to people who make, on average, less than $400 per week base pay. She claims it is an acceptable policy because fire departments do the same thing, however, full time fire fighters also are paid salary plus overtime and usually make between $40,000 and $50,000 per year, way more than our measly paychecks. Hell, I worked over 1000 OT hours last year and ran more calls than any other EMT-B at my station and didn't even break $30,000 for the year. Additionally, according to the overtime rules, municipalities are exempt from paying overtime in some (maybe all) cases. For-profit corporations who already rape their employees, on the other hand, are required to pay overtime pay.
My issue was not that they weren't paying me overtime, exactly. I can see them not paying me
overtime for the shift as there is a term in the wording of the overtime law that describes a "work-trade agreement" where they can pay regular pay instead of OT, but it seems ill-defined and through my research, I could not find a suitable explanation of what would constitute such a work-trade agreement. My problem lay in the fact that they were going to pay another employee for the shift that I worked. My boss, who cruises around town in her Lexus, could not see a problem with paying one guy for another's work. And when I confronted her about it, she told me flat out that this was company policy and that she was not, under any circumstances, going to pay me for the shift. I felt it my right, and obligation, to go as far up the hierarchy as necessary to get my money. Since she claimed it was a company policy, it never has been and they cannot legally make it a policy, I saw that next higher authority was the Illinois Department of Labor. In order that I got all the facts straight when I discussed the situation with them, and that I had a paper trail that showed the company's position as described by my boss, I wrote her a short email with the situation described as I saw it and a very short mention that I was going to go to the IDoL. Two days later, she tells me that they are going to pay me and my regional manager apologized about it to me. My boss, however, still maintained that the error was on my part and not on her's and so the policy was not being changed.
This is not the first time that I have seen the company try to screw over the employees, and I can assure you that it will not be the last. As such, I felt it was my duty to inform my coworkers of what the situation was in order that they not get caught up in any "trade time" debacles and so I did so. it got back to my manager that somebody agreed with me and told her that they did. She thought that the situation was settled so she, the assistant station manager, the regional manager and I had to have a meeting the other day.
So yeah, long story long... My company tried to screw me over and I will not stand for them doing so.
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